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1 Cover Sheet Title: Relocating Iphigénie En Tauride Author Name View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by St Andrews Research Repository Cover sheet Title: Relocating Iphigénie en Tauride Author name: Jane Pettegree Author address: Department of Music, University of St Andrews, 65 North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 8NL Email: [email protected] Author biog: Jane Pettegree completed a PhD on metaphor and identity in early modern drama in 2009, and her monograph on this topic appeared in 2011 (Foreign and Native on the English Stage, 1588-1611, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). She is currently director of teaching in the Department of Music at the University of St Andrews, where she also teaches courses on opera and literature. Abstract: This article reflects upon the director’s experience of directing Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride with a student opera company (Byre Opera) in June 2015, and in particular, insights gained about the topical issues raised by this work. Discussion of this particular production is laid alongside reviews of other, professional productions of this piece in the same year, which reveal a range of possible reactions to the potential for Gluck’s composition to be read as reflecting contemporary anxieties and concerns. The article engages with an earlier essay by Michael Ewans in SMT 9(2) 2015, developing and qualifying suggestions made by Ewans about the classical framing of Gluck’s opera to make the work relatable for modern audiences. It concludes that the classical location is used to position a very specific and not necessarily trans-historical set of topical and political resonances; this places a gap between mimetic representation and reality that should be carefully considered by any company hoping to produce the work using a contemporary realist staging. Keywords: opera; Gluck; topicality; Iphigénie; Euripides; education. 1 Relocating Iphigénie en Tauride Introduction How can a modern production of Gluck’s Greek operas persuade modern audiences that these stories are vital and emotionally engaging, and not merely pretty museum pieces? As Michael Ewans, writing in this journal in 2015 argues, Gluck’s four ‘Greek’ plots are ‘intense psychological music-dramas that were far ahead of their time’ (Ewans 2015: 162). Ewans’s essay explored the particular production decisions taken by Pierre Audi’s hard-edged staging of Iphigénie en Aulide (1774) and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) on an unconventional scaffold stage with De Nederlandse Opera in 2011. Audi’s ambitious project allowed audiences to experience these works sequentially, making clear that ritual violence has power to do lasting psychological damage in ways that made an easy ‘happy ending’ equally inappropriate for either half of the story. Furthermore, Audi’s productions allowed audiences to draw parallels between these ancient sacrifices and the contemporary world: ‘Gluck’s version of these episodes from ancient Greek myth dramatizes situations and feelings to which audiences can and should relate today’ (Ewans 2015: 163). Audi’s production, argued Ewans, was powerful because it jettisoned the trappings of 18th century ‘classical’ prettiness, replacing these with a return to a staging that was ultimately faithful to the core spirit of the Greek original. While agreeing with Ewans, and in particular, his point that drama is at its most powerful as social ritual when it engages with its contemporary 21st century audience’s fears and anxieties, I propose to discuss my experience of directing a student production of Iphigénie en Tauride in 2015 as it highlights, I believe, some issues of critical response to opera in general, and to this work in particular, which can destabilise classical productions of these ostensibly ‘timeless’ plots and characters. As an amateur production, put on with a tiny budget with a mainly student cast with limited experience of opera, our production was necessarily less ambitious than the Dutch one, but as a teaching and research experience, it revealed a great deal about operatic hermeneutics as a tussle between competing interests and expectations. This article’s reflection on our experience, together with the accompanying research on audience reception and critical 2 engagement with other productions of this work, may suggest ideas and possible strategies for other productions. [IMAGE 1 HERE] Image 1: Opening sequence showing reduced stage space in relation to orchestra pit. Movement blocking was necessarily cautious. (Photo credit: Ben Goulter Photography) The Ethics of Topicality The University of St Andrews does not currently run music degrees, but does have a strong and vibrant tradition of singing and student-led drama, which helped Michael Downes (Director of Music) and myself to form a University opera company in 2009: St Andrews Opera, renamed Byre Opera when the University took on the lease of the Byre Theatre in 2010. Since then, the company has put on one annual production, led musically by Michael Downes, and alternating between in-house direction by me and direction by outside professionals as the budgets allow. When deciding on a suitable production for the University’s opera company each session, the casting needs to reflect the availability of potential leads from the current student body, which means it needs to be sympathetic to the youthfulness of the available singers. Byre Opera is subsidised by a publicly funded University, and so also has a responsibility to develop and educate its cast and, potentially, to provide opportunities for academic research. The projects I have directed for this group (Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Eccles The Judgement of Paris, and Handel’s Acis and Galatea) have all involved small but important choruses, and have all involved some degree of academic backroom input. When I rather naively proposed in autumn 2013 that we should attempt Gluck’s last great reform opera, Iphigénie en Tauride, it was Pierre Audi’s productions – by then available on DVD – that attracted me to the piece, and in particular, the dramatic interactions between oppositional choruses and the isolated and damaged eponymous heroine. Both of Gluck’s Iphigénie operas show the capacity of crowds to use ritual to normalise 3 violence, and for women in particular to internalise this: in Aulide, the Greek people constantly remind Agamemnon that his rule depends on leading the ships against the Trojan enemy and Iphigénie becomes convinced that it is right and proper that she should be sacrificed to achieve this end, while in Tauride, the division of the chorus into gendered groups puts a particularly gendered inflection on the collective dynamics of human sacrifice that underpin these societies.1 Indeed, it was the gender dynamics that attracted me initially to the Tauride plot, as I could imagine a student body readily being able to relate to this, and believed that it could help the cast explore ways in which violent cultural norms implicate both men and women using similar but subtly different mechanisms of engagement. Moreover, it seemed to me that these issues were becoming topically urgent as religious and ethnic divisions in our contemporary world are throwing up opportunities for both young men and young women to become ideologically radicalised and thus potentially to engage in acts of destruction in defiance of western liberal mechanisms intended to contain and limit political violence. In short, initially the plot suggested issues to me that were not simply timeless, but which were urgently topical. [IMAGE 2 HERE] Image 2: Ethnic confrontations in Act 4 (Photo Credit: Ben Goulter Photography) With these high-minded ambitions in mind, I hoped that this production would explore the sorts of contemporary resonances that I could sense had been implicated by Audi’s production. By the time 2015 arrived, this had gained even more urgency as the precise issue faced by the Tauridians – that is, how to react to the arrival of strangers on their shores – was the subject of hot debate by European liberal democracies faced with the arrival of refugees from war-torn areas of the middle east and north Africa. Indeed, the topicality was almost too obvious. 1 A note on names The English translation used for our production, prepared by Dr Julia Prest (School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews), opted to retain the French ‘Iphigénie’ rather than the Anglified ‘Iphigenia’ as this corresponded better with Gluck’s 4-syllable rhythms and melodic accents. 4 I began to have an awareness of this when I started to prepare the image sequence that I used to frame the opening of our production. One challenge for a modern audience is that the back-story of the house of Atreus, which would have been well-known in the 18th century, is far from universally known even to an audience in a university community. At the suggestion of Jonathan May, an associate teacher of singing at the University Music Centre and the vocal teacher of several of our student principals, I put together a ‘newspaper page’ sequence of images which provided a quick digest of the major events preceding the Tauride plot. This was placed immediately prior to the playing of the overture and described in headlines the main prequel events: gathering troops to sail on Troy; the disappearance of Iphigénie and rumours of her sacrifice; Clytemnestra’s fury, and Agamemnon’s assassination; the murder of Clytemnestra and her lover by a distraught Orestes, and Orestes’s subsequent flight. The layout of the news-sheet used fonts and broad design elements drawn from British contemporary low-budget urban newspapers, and the headlines were accompanied by images intended to align this ancient Greek story with modern press stories of troop interventions, civil wars and domestic violence. And this is where I hit my first dissonant moment. Before even needing to tackle any practical issues of copyright image clearance, as I researched possible contemporary images for my newspaper I became increasingly uncomfortable about using the personal tragedies of real lives in such a direct way to illustrate what would be, for most if not all of the audience, an ephemeral piece of entertainment.
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